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Keira Knightley on Atonement
By Fred Topel | Image property of Focus Features.
Atonement
Knightley Talks Atonement
"The book was incredibly helpful, in making this film," she said. "What Ian McEwan does brilliantly are these incredible internal monologues for each of the characters, which I think might have had something to do with why people always said this is an unfilmable novel. As far as playing it, it was incredibly helpful because it constantly meant that you knew exactly where your character was coming from. If they were behaving badly, as mine sort of is, at the beginning of the film, you understand why. You understand why they’re slightly on edge and why they make decisions that, perhaps, aren’t the right decisions. So, a lot of it came from the book."
Much of Knightley's past few years has been spent performing costumed period pieces, though the indimate drama of Atonement is a far cry from the big action spectacle of Pirates. "You adjust your speed. You have less time to do things, which I like, actually. You do something like Pirates, which is obviously technical, it’s about explosions, it’s about action. That, as everybody will tell you, takes a long time to get right. When you’re doing something like Atonement, you have less time to do it. You have less money, so you have to do it quicker, but it’s a much more intense working experience, which I think, for any actor, is what you’re looking for because you want to be living in that moment. It’s the excitement of finding those emotions. On your big, explosive films, the film set is quite a technical space, as it should be. On a film like Atonement, the space was very much the actors’, which was enjoyable, absolutely."
"His angelic kind of character was something I didn’t identify with because I’m not an angel. I kind of found him difficult to recognize as a member of society and therefore play him truthfully because he was so good. It wasn’t until I really kind of accepted the potential that someone like that could exist and I started kind of identifying with the character and falling in love with the character, and that took about a week of rehearsals of me playing it quite badly I felt. That was one of the biggest challenges also to play someone so good, what he is as an actor is he’s not going to be interesting enough so you keep trying to make him more interesting and that’s when you kind of fuck up because human beings are interesting and bad acting is people trying to make them more interesting, you know. That’s one example of bad acting anyway and that was something I had to watch I didn’t fall into doing."
There are a lot of McEwan fans, so Knightley would have a lot to answer to for her portrayal of Cecilia Tallis. "That’s not why you make a film. You don’t go, 'Ooh, I’m doing an iconic film.' I think it was an incredibly well written script and incredibly well written characters, both from the script and, obviously, from the book. It’s very difficult to find good characters in films, particularly female characters. There aren’t that many. A lot of the time, actresses get critiqued on the fact that the roles just aren’t there. So what you often try to do is really take something out of the page that certainly isn’t written on it. With this, it was there. It was very much there, in the book and in the script. So I was incredibly lucky to get the part."
Cecilia is not the type of girl you could label as a good guy or bad guy. "Quite often, we have characters that are very black or white. They’re good or they’re bad. These ones aren’t. They’ve got layers to them. I think that she is a good person, but she’s just behaving badly. She’s got very obvious flaws in her personality that are not particularly nice traits, but that still doesn’t mean that she’s a bad person. I think it’s always interesting to look at the flaws because that’s what makes characters, and people, interesting. You want to have negative aspects, so that you can look at the positive as well. I think that she’s a fascinating character."
Knightley agreed with her costar James McAvoy that the tea shop reunion scene was perhaps the most challenging, but that's why she liked it. "If you did that in a modern day piece, they’d be able to say exactly what they wanted to say to each other. It would all come out, and it would be rather melodramatic. The fact that they can’t find the words, and they can’t speak to each other, suddenly this time that they’ve been separate, even though they’ve been writing all the time and they’ve been waiting, and she’s sacrificed so much, and he’s been in jail, it suddenly becomes a physical thing between them, and they suddenly realize that they don’t know each other anymore. It was always my favorite scene, between Robbie and Cecilia, when I read the script, but it was difficult because you have to know, I suppose, the emotions that they would be going through, but you can’t play them. It was a really interesting exercise in keeping the lid on everything, which I have to say the whole film was. It’s all about what isn’t said. That was a particularly interesting scene about really underplaying everything and not letting it [come out]."
Atonement is now playing.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Focus Features.
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